Wide-set brown eyes. Dark hair. Narrow nose. No freckles.
Goose bumps rose in a wave over my arms, in spite of the warm night. “Gallagher, I recognize him.”
“What? How?”
“I...” I pushed hair back from my face and, too late, I realized I’d just smeared blood across my temples. “Thefuriaealready killed him once. This is the man I remembered from the forest. This is the man Ialready killed.”
Gallagher stood, and the beam of light swung across the grass to shine through the back door into Malloy’s kitchen. “The man from last night looked just like this man? Is that what you’re saying?”
“He looked like this man looks now. Not like he looked a few minutes ago.” I frowned, staring down at a face I could no longer clearly see without aid from the flashlight. “Thefuriaekilled two men who looked just alike. What’s going on, Gallagher?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any urge to be near the blood? To soak it up, or...roll in it?”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s certainly messy. But not unheard of for toddlers who haven’t yet mastered the more graceful methods of consumption.”
“No, I have no urge to roll in the blood. But I do have the urge to...flee the scene.”
“Yes, we should go. But there’s no sense wasting all this.” Gallagher knelt on the ground, heedless of the blood surely soaking into the knee of his left pant leg, and set his glamoured red cap on the ground, inches from the body.
When we’d left the cabin, his baseball cap had looked faded and old. Sun-bleached, its color hardly recognizable as red. Now, in the light from my phone, it looked brand-new and deeply pigmented, having been revitalized during the slaughter of Oliver Malloy. Yet as I watched, Gallagher’s hat began to soak up the blood pooled beneath it, as well.
When that puddle had been absorbed into the material, blood began to run from the other puddles, rollingupindividual blades of grass—in defiance of gravity—toward the hat. Though the bleeding had stopped along with the beating of the dead man’s heart, except for a slow dribble, blood began to pour from his neck again, drawn to Gallagher’s hat like metal shavings to a magnet.
Blood condensed out of the dirt and reformed droplets that had dissolved minutes earlier. But the strangest of all was the sudden sensation that my clothes and skin were...drying.
Startled, I reclaimed my phone from Gallagher and aimed it at my shirt, where I saw blood coalesce into several thin red streams, rolling down my clothing like rivers to drip onto the ground. A feather-soft sensation brushed my neck and arms, and I reaimed the light to see the same thing happening with the blood that had begun to dry on my skin.
In minutes, it was gone. All of it. Not a splotch or splatter remained on my clothing or skin. My hands were spotless.
If I weren’t still standing over a corpse, I’d have every reason in the world to believe I’d imagined the whole thing.
“Wow. Serial killers all over the world wish they had your cleanup skill,” I whispered.
Gallagher snorted as the last of the blood was drawn into his hat like a countertop spill absorbed by a paper towel. “The point is to make efficient use of the blood. The cleanup is just a bonus.”
My teeth began to chatter again, and he looked up at me with a concerned tilt of his head. “Let me gather up all the pieces, and we’ll go.”
I nodded, trying not to think about what he was describing.
A few minutes later, Gallagher and I left Malloy’s house. He was carrying two bulging black trash bags.
We made it to the van without any trouble, and on the hour-long drive back to the cabin, I couldn’t stop seeing the stranger lying dead in Malloy’s backyard. The farther we got from the scene of the crime and the less imminent the danger of being captured became, the clearer the reality of what we’d just done came into focus.
Two bodies.
We hadn’t killed them escaping. Or in self-defense. We weren’t saving friends’ lives. Gallagher was getting revenge. I was...
Well, as usual, I was being used by the universe as a weapon of vengeful destruction. Only this time...
“What’s wrong?” Gallagher glanced away from the road to study my profile for a second. “You look like you’re going to break the handle off the door.”
I hadn’t even realized I was clutching it. I forced my hands into what was left of my lap and took a deep breath. “I have no evidence that that man actually deserved what he got. Gallagher, I might have helped kill an innocent man.” And if tonight’s victim was innocent, the man in the woods from last night might well have been, too. “What’s happening?” Gallagher didn’t have an answer. I knew that, but I still had to ask. “Why would twofaewho look exactly alike glamour themselves to look like other men? Why would thefuriaewant me to kill them, when I didn’t see them do anything wrong?”
He shrugged with a glance at the highway sign overhead as we passed beneath it. “Maybe she knows something you don’t.”
“I certainly hope so, because otherwise, this isn’t justice. It’s just murder. And this time it felt like she was using me. Like she waswearingme. That’s not how she operates.”
